Monday, February 23, 2015

I spotted a letter to the editor in our local paper that chastised a pastor for writing a Sunday pastors’ column that commented on the national debt. The writer believed that it was out of line for a pastor to comment publicly on political matters. He abused the privilege of writing a column that is supposed to be about religion, not politics. I didn’t read the column in question, and knowing the pastor, I doubt that I would have agreed with much of what he had to say.

However, and it’s a big however, I cannot imagine how it would be possible to follow Jesus Christ, especially as a pastor, and not have a great deal to say about politics. On Ash Wednesday many of us heard a passage from Isaiah in which God called on his people to: “…to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke;…to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them…” Luke writes that Jesus, reading from the same prophet, announced that he was the one to “…bring good news to the poor,…proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” My favorite ethical prophet, Amos, wrote at length about the political sins that made God angry not only of Israel, but of all the surrounding territories. They are not so different from many of our own behaviors. If you haven’t read Amos lately, you might be surprised that God has something to say about taxes, housing, income disparity, wealth, international relations, civil behavior, etc. All familiar ground.

God is not disinterested in how we organize our communal lives, and doing that is politics. There is no way around it. I’d like to offer up a series of pithy quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., or maybe one of the Niebuhrs, but you can do that for yourselves. The point is that Christianity is a religion that has a lot to say about politics, and pastors are called upon to do a lot of the saying.

It does raise a problem. We are called to speak, with a provisional level of confidence, from what we know of God as revealed in scripture, to the political environment in which we live. It is a prophetic voice that can only be uttered after prayerful confrontation with God, honest confrontation with self, and a serious time of reflection. We are not called to speak from our own deeply held political ethos that we have decorated with scriptural citations. More important, we may not speak with absolute certainty, nor may we attribute to God the certainty of our own political values. Getting that camel through the eye of the needle is not easy. Nevertheless, it is something we are called by God in Christ to do.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Loving the people I don’t like. That was my lenten discipline last year, and it is again. I’ve not made much progress in the last twelve months. It started with some prayerful reflection on what it means to love God and neighbor as the most important part of fulfilling the deepest intention of the law. Neighbors are not always easy to love, especially if you don’t like them. The generalized Christian claim that “I love everybody” just doesn’t cut it. It’s easy enough to love the people I like. Anybody can do that, says St. Paul. So my original idea was to learn to love the people I don’t like who inhabit various parts of my life. It’s more complicated than I expected.

It turns out that disliking someone is a variable that ranges from “I can tolerate you except for these two or three things you do/are that really get under my skin” to “What you say and do borders on the despicable and I really don’t like you at all.” None of the people within that range are enemies as such. I’m not trying to learn to love my enemies. I’m just trying to learn to love the people I don’t like, and it’s hard. Some I’ve learned to tolerate in reasonably good humor. Some I prefer to avoid except when socially or professionally required. Some I keep emotionally and physically as far away from me as possible. Oddly enough, it seems these are the very people Jesus would have me learn to love.

Continuing prayerful reflection on this problem, I had to face the unpleasant fact that many of them don’t like me either, and I find that very hard to believe. Me? A gentle priest of the Church? How could that be? How do you bridge the gap of mutual dislike? It also brings into question the meaning of what it is to love. I know all the Greek words for it. I’ve read Lewis’s The Four Loves. I can recall a bit of Plato, though not much. As a practical matter, they don’t help. Love has become a catchall that hovers somewhere between erotic passion and tepid, unfocused affection. The love of God as revealed in Christ Jesus seems to embrace all of that and so much more that I have no words of understanding to give it.

You can see how this gets complicated, and why it continues to be my lenten discipline. If it would just hold still for a while, maybe I could get a grip on it. But we have added a new dimension popularly known as the polarization of society. Extremist camps throughout the world, every part of our own nation, and my own community have made it very difficult not to affiliate with at least one of them. The guiding principle of each is that any deviation whatsoever from their adopted ideology is not to be tolerated. The only goal of each is to obliterate all others by whatever means necessary. It makes conversation very difficult, and if we can’t have conversation, how can we learn to love each other in spite of not liking each other very much?

And so here I am at the start of Lent once more. Once more I will take up the forty day challenge to be intentional and diligent about learning to love the people I don’t like. I think I will work on two dimensions. One, letting the light of Christ shine through me into the lives of those I don’t like. In other words, getting out of God’s way and letting him do what I can’t. Second, doing what I can to allow Christ’s light to flow into my life from people I don’t like. That could be very hard for me. We shall see.

Monday, February 9, 2015

We worship at a small church on Maui for a few weeks each winter, and have for over twenty years. I’ve written before about it: its near demise, its resuscitation, the vital ministry it offers to tourists and seasonal visitors, its participation in important work providing needed help to the homeless population that hovers about, almost invisible to most of us.

On most Sundays the small nave is comfortably full. I would guess a little over a hundred. But the core congregation, the members who live here full time, who pledge and serve in all the ways a congregation requires, that core congregation is very small, a few dozen. That means that funds to support ongoing ministry must come from tourists and seasonal visitors. And therein lies the problem. The congregation struggles from month to month to cover the bills. Somehow they do it, but always with a certain degree of trepidation.

You would think that a full church almost every Sunday would not have a problem like that, but the simple fact is that the visitors who fill it are stingy. Stingy may be a bit harsh. How about cheap? They would be offended to hear it put that way. After all, they are on vacation and have given up an entire Sunday morning to worship. They didn’t have to. They wanted to. These are the faithful back home, and they are the faithful here too. Most of them are older rather than younger, and I have no doubt that they are mainstays of their home congregations. And yet the offering plate is filled with small bills when, in my not so humble opinion, it should be filled with fifties and hundreds.

Fifty, that’s about the cost of lunch for two. One hundred, a not too expensive dinner. How much is it worth to have a well managed place for worship, a worship experience that is well planned and conducted with welcoming grace? How much is it worth to know that the gift one offers to God will go beyond an hour on Sunday to continue Christ’s healing work for others in the community?

I don’t think these faithful people give it much thought. They don’t mean to take this place for granted, and they would take umbrage if someone accused them of taking God for granted. They’re not mean spirited, they just don’t give it much thought at all. Add to that the fact that Episcopalians break out in hives at the mention of money and church, and you get offering plates filled with small bills.

Well, like I said, we’ve been here a few weeks each winter for over twenty years. The place is still here. One way or another God’s Spirit keeps rejuvenating it, but it would be nice to have visitors give with joyful generosity one of these days.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Have you considered the meaning of the word technology? After all, we live in “the technological age,” or so I’m told. So what is technology?

Many years ago, a great many, I was working for a state planning agency as a very young community development type person. The agency got a grant for a lot of money to engage in some kind of planning involving the application of technology to economic development. I had one inappropriate suggestion, and one inappropriate question. The suggestion was that we could incorporate the required work plan into our existing work plan and staff. What a silly idea that was. The grant included funds for a director, assistant director, and a couple of staffers. Of course the fiefdom would be enlarged. Anything else would have been crazy.

The question was, “What is technology?” I got long meandering, nearly incoherent, rambling non answers from my seniors, and rolling eyeball smirks from my colleagues. Really, what is technology? Everybody knows what technology is! What a dumb question! Don’t ask it again!

That was sometime in the late 1960s. I still haven’t heard a good answer.

These days I think we speak of technology as if it included only things electronic, especially things that are related to computers, tablets, and smart phones. But my neanderthal brain believes that technology is the application of any sort of tool that helps a human being modify something, anything, so that the thing will be useful, or more useful, in the doing of some activity. If that’s true, we have never not lived in the technological age.

With that thought in mind, I go back to that old state planning agency grant and wonder if it would have been helpful to use the money to examine local economic impacts of technological applications over, say, the last century, asking questions such as: Who benefitted and who was hurt by them?; Who opposed them and why?; Who favored them and why? How long did it take to recoup initial investments in them?; What cultural changes resulted?; What was anticipated accurately and what inaccurately? That might have been followed up with examining short term emerging technologies on the horizon, and asking the same questions about them.

I say short term because I don’t think we are very good at guessing about the long term. Who, in 1968, would have guessed about laptops, smart phones, and tablets? The short term is what we are good at. At the same time we can open our minds to the expectation that “the future” will come with technological changes we were not able to predict. We can, however, predict that the unknown changes will come, and we can predict something about the dynamics of the social changes they will bring with them.

We can prepare by asking questions like the ones above. They are not about technology per se, but about people, cultures, and historical dynamics. We can even make guesses about general areas in which technological change might occur. What’s in surplus, what’s in short supply, where do things itch, and what would be fun or interesting? That old state planning agency might have done something like that, but it didn’t. In fact, I don’t think it did anything worth remembering. But why pick on a nearly fifty year old incident. We could be preparing for our own near term future now. It looks like some people have. We might not know what a new technology will be, but we do know that some will be helped, and some hurt. Maybe we could be better at understanding the dynamics of help and hurt. In fact, we might pay more attention to understanding the full range of technological impact on social change. What is it that evokes strong, gut level, opposition? What is it that evokes unreflective enthusiasm? How can we better tolerate the impact of early financial losses? Can the stress of cultural change be a positive force? We can ask those kinds of questions, and, perhaps, not be caught so flat footed in the future. I don’t think we will do it. That kind of community thinking requires too much hard work, and it always punches holes in whatever we think is right and good.

Oh well. Why should we be different from any other generation. Floundering is what we do best, and maybe that’s the way it should be. I just wish that we would be more honest about what we are: world class, very smart, flounderers, who have not yet destroyed the world we hope to improve.

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About Me

Walla Walla, Washington, Way out west in a green valley up against some small mountains, United States

I'm Steven Woolley, a retired small town preacher. I've spent many years in the big city, had a long career in public policy consulting, been an adjunct professor, traveled around the globe, done a few thngs no one should. In the end I'm just a retired country parson.